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alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."

If you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux, yes. I know that my last companies used them for their Linux machines. Red Hat has many customers [redhat.com] some of them big names like Qualcomm and NTT Telecom.

At first, I guessed that it might have something to do with the common conception that one can run more things on a single Red Hat server than on a single Windows server. But a couple Google searches later, I found this Microsoft white paper [google.com] claiming that Red Hat doesn't charge for client access licenses for RHEL.

RedHat eventually added PostgreSQL 8.4 as an option for RHEL5, so it wouldn't be surprising to find that eventually they decide to make 9.0 (or 9.1) available for RHEL6. This really isn't as big of an issue as people think though. One of the PostgreSQL core team members is employed by RedHat, and the updated PostgreSQL packages available from their yum repo are extremely close to the RHEL builds. The same group of people is involved in the packaging and version updates, and the PostgreSQL yum repo is kept as current with security fixes as the RHEL releases of that same version are.

On a per server basis, maybe, but once you pay for a year of Red Hat support you're done. No per seat licenses. It's like $200 (more now? I don't know.. I don't actually handle the money part) to "license" a server for a year (really for a year's worth of support). That's it. Got 2 users? $200. Got 2000 users? $200. The support is good too. Got a problem? Open a ticket. They'll pretty much solve it for you, no per incident charges.

CentOS is a server platform. You run databases and web servers on it. Don't put it on your desktop, that's not what it's for. The lack of desktop support is intentional, it allows them to focus on server performance and quality. My CentOS machines have less than 800 packages installed and they still feel bloated

Maybe you can run it on a desktop if you load it up with EPEL and rpmfusion, but at that point you are probably better off with something else.

Often times they will not even update featuresets for certain packages at all, they will just backport any security fixes that come out. This is both good and bad, good because you don't have to worry about updates breaking anything, bad because you may not be able to use the latest and greatest software packages out there. Whether you should be using bleeding edge at all for "enterprise" is another debate altogether.

Thats actually not true. Red Hat has multiple support centers including US based, who respondes is largely dependent upon which tech is monitoring the queue, no different than any other helpdesk. I've also had much better luck with them than either Oracle or MS, though I readily admit I'm usually calling about non-technical issues.

No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post [redhat.com], titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.

Touche, but windows licensing really does get people into trouble. I have seen many small shops who had no CALs and in some cases no Sharepoint CALs. They were upset when they found out you had to buy the software and then the right to use it separately. I really think Microsoft does this on purpose, since violations can turn into real money very quickly.

Does this include the directory server that mac's and windows machines can work with ?

Windows machines have poor support for "directory servers" compared to most other OSs. If you mean an Active Directory replacement, no, because Windows machines expect that Active Directory has LDAP, Kerberos, CIFS, DNS and a few other services *all* running on the "directory server" (where other OSs allow these to be separated and/or scaled differently). If you need AD support with GPOs etc., you can consider trying samba4, but it's still in alpha (although some sites are running it in production). If you just need to authenticate Windows desktops, and don't need GPO-only features (but user/group policies are sufficient, if crufty), samba-3.5 as provided in RHEL6 may be sufficient.

The OpenLDAP included with RHEL6 is good enough for all other operating systems with support for "directory servers", including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris, AIX etc.

Redhats "support" is pretty bad if you don't get the super-ultra-deluxe package or whatever it is called. It's India based email support and often times they don't really understand the question, they just seize upon a couple of keywords and respond back with various kb articles on those keywords. Worthless IMO.

Is this RHEL support or are you talking about some other product?

I posted a support issue recently regarding some RHEL 3 servers I am stuck maintaining that run a legacy application. It was pretty much an edge case issue that I was experiencing but it was holding me up at the time. I posted it to the their forums and they did eventually post a response (from a RedHat employee) that solved the issue. It may have taken a week or two and I had worked around the problem by then anyway, but it was a much better and more thorough response than I expected.

It certainly was not someone throwing me a few links to some knowledge base articles as I had already thoroughly read this looking for a solution before I posted anything.

I often wonder the same thing. I am inclined to think they are using "i386" as a moniker for "32-bit Intel x86 processors." Will RHEL6 actually load on a honest-to-goodness 386 box from 1991? I have a feeling not, and that a i586-class, or perhaps even i1686-class, processor is really required to run the thing.